


Upon a Dream

by garden of succulents (staranise)



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Collective Unconscious, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Dreams and Nightmares, Dreamsharing, Hurt/Comfort, Jungian Psychology, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-29
Updated: 2016-04-29
Packaged: 2018-06-05 07:03:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6694387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/staranise/pseuds/garden%20of%20succulents
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>True dreams about your soulmate are very rare, they said in Jack’s sex ed class.  Most people have only had between five and ten by the time they reach adulthood.   “But I always dreamed about skating,” his mother said once, leaning into Jack’s father like the world’s sturdiest support.  “My sister said I skated in my sleep at least once a week.  And your father kept dreaming about palm trees. Sometimes it’s just that strong.”</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Sometimes your dreams are true, and sometimes your dreams point you to the people who will matter most in your life.  Sometimes they point you to the person your soul most longs for.</p><p>Sometimes they don't.  That's something you have to figure out for yourself.  It's what you do on waking up that matters most.</p><p>Three dreams.  Three awakenings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content Note:** This chapter deals with Jack when he was 19 and very depressed, and his thoughts/opinions/feelings are presented as fact by the narration, when they’re actually very distorted views of reality; mentions of suicide, drug use, and sexual assault.

True dreams about your soulmate are very rare, they said in Jack’s sex ed class.  Most people have only had between five and ten by the time they reach adulthood.   “But I always dreamed about skating,” his mother said once, leaning into Jack’s father like the world’s sturdiest support.  “My sister said I skated in my sleep at least once a week.  And your father kept dreaming about palm trees. Sometimes it’s just that strong.”

But it might actually be even rarer than that.  He’s used the library in this treatment centre’s dayroom, which is well-stocked with self-help books about psychology, and looked it up.  The truth is, it’s really hard to know, because most dreams are just  _dreams_ , made-up mush of imagination and daily life, hardly dipping at all into the collective unconscious.  And–the words burned through him–it was hard to tell since memories could change, and a lot of true dreams were only recognized after the dreamer met the person they were about, so it was easy to persuade yourself almost anything had been, in hindsight, a sign pointing you to them.

It feels like his entire life, Jack has dreamed about silver skates carving a circle into blue-white ice.  But that has never helped him narrow anything down.

* * *

He'd been eight.   _I dreamed I tried to pet a big yellow cat, but she bit me. It was hot outside._   He’d woken up with a yell, his hand stinging, then saw that the cat’s bite was still on his hand, the blood welling up bright red and dripping onto his sheets, and he’d screamed for real.  His parents came running; his mother had brought some antiseptic and a bandage for the marks on Jack’s hand, and his father had written down the dream exactly the way Jack said it.

“It hurts, baby,” his mother had said, kissing it better, “but this way you know–” she held his hand between hers, “–there’s someone out there who’s going to love you very much someday.”

“Do I always get hurt when they do?” he’d asked anxiously.

“Of course not, sweetie.  It almost never happens.  Unless they’re hurt very badly indeed, you won’t feel it at all when you’re awake.  Most of the dreams you have will probably be about happy things.”

He’d been afraid of falling asleep again for a long time after that, but the cat bite healed without a scar.

* * *

Everyone in Group has been talking about dreams lately; it’s why Jack bothered to look it up. It’s a depressing topic, personally.  He’s kept quiet in Group a lot. He knows they all hate them–most of the kids here have real, fucked-up reasons for being here, foster homes and abusive parents and rapes and car crashes.  He’s just a fucked-up rich kid whose only horrible life event was being born, and absolutely no excuse for what he did.  He doesn’t want to bore them with his drama.  

He doesn’t go to social events either, doesn’t watch movies or play in the ping-pong tournament.  Sometimes he reads books.  Mostly, when no one gets him up and drags him somewhere, he lies in his bed and thinks about how much easier it would have been if he’d stayed dead.

He’d honestly though the person he’d always dreamed about was Kent Parson, who once went skating as a birthday party when he was a kid, where his mom had walked onto the ice with her boots on, where there had been an American flag hanging from the rafters, just like Jack had dreamed once.  

He’d convinced himself they were soulmates.  He’d convinced himself of a lot of things.  The thought of being drafted onto different teams next year had absolutely gutted him, but he’d convinced himself it was cool, he was okay, he was going to manage it after all, right up until he didn’t. Then Jack had flatlined in an ER room while Kenny bought a Snickers from the vending machine in the waiting room and then called his mom again and never even known.

That’s not the actual reason he’s not calling Parse back. The reality of missing the draft, of not even making it into the same league as him, is even more devastating.  He couldn’t be more ashamed of himself if he and Parse were so tightly soulbonded he could feel it when Kenny farted.  As much as it’s a disappointment it’s also a relief because it means Parse will be okay without him. They’re not soulmates, so he’ll find somebody else now that Jack has let him down.

*** 

Jack dreams of hockey skates, sharp and clear and lucid. Voices echo off painted cinderblock and he knows this isn’t him, knows he’s dreaming, but he can’t leave the dream.  The team around him is laughing, talking like birdsong.  The skates are broken in, old and soft in parts, but they aren’t familiar.  The stick he carries to the rink has old and ratty tape on the blade.

Part of him is thinking, _another fucking hockey dream?  Can we not?_

Unexpectedly he wobbles when his skates hit the ice, his legs splaying, and he reaches for the boards and wheels around, trying to find his feet.  Someone laughs at him.  "I thought you could skate!“

Of course he can skate.  He skates in his dreams, so fast he’s flying, so sure and deft he’s like a falcon in the air. He lets go of the boards and pushes off again, trying to regain that grace on feet that feel truncated, crippled and unsteady, half as sure as they ought to be.  The coach is blowing a whistle, a tall woman with an iron-grey ponytail, and she’s got a clipboard.  He tries to stay upright on his skates.  "Who here has never played hockey before?” she asks.

Everyone turns to look at him, because his arm is in the air.  "First time on hockey skates,“ he says.  On the other side of the group of people two girls have their arms up too.  Inside the dream Jack thinks, _This is a metaphor for therapy. These must represent the people in my group._

"Okay,” the coach says, “get to the blue line and we’ll start some drills.”  She blows her whistle again and some of the group hustle, but he doesn’t.  He pushes his legs out of an L position, gliding in a loop before lazily making for a spot near the boards.

_Too weird, too weird, too weird,_  Jack thinks.  He can feel himself waking up, trapped between sleep and waking dream, going to be one of those paralyzed sleep terrors, but he makes himself calm down and relax.  It’s kind of like a panic attack.  They’ve taught him how to deal with this.

_Five things you can hear,_  he thinks to himself, and he hears: Coach’s whistle, the scrape of blades on ice.  The rattle of a cart on a linoleum floor.  Birds outside his window.  The sound of his own breath.

_Four things you can see._   A hockey stick with pink tape.  His rumpled bedsheets.  The window with the sun coming up.  His hand, lying limp on the bed.

_Three things you can feel._   Cold, like air conditioning in August, like frost.  The mattress pressing up against his body.  One leg lying on top of the other.

_Two things you can smell._   Ice? Ice and BO, ice and… sweat. It’s his sweat.  He wakes up every morning covered in slime. Night sweats from his medication.  His body has regained control of itself and he rolls onto his back, no longer like lying like a stunned possum.

_One thing you can taste._

Unexpectedly, peaches and cinnamon burst across his tongue, with something soft and sweet that reminds him of brown sugar.  It’s so vivid it hardly even goes away when he summons up spit and swallows.  It makes him hungry for the first time since June and lingers in his mouth until he gets up and sets feet on the floor.

The suddenness with which it goes away feels supernatural, and the uncomfortable words _true dream_  flit into his mind.  Uneasily, he rubs an unscarred spot on his hand.  For a minute he just stands there, not knowing what to do.  But since the dream has got him up anyway, he stuffs his feet in his slippers and goes out to look for food.


	2. Chapter 2

Winter Solstice approaches.  The team dreams into each other.

You can tell it’s a good season when they fall into sleep together across campus, across Samwell, Wicklund in his aunt’s house the far side of town and Shitty down the hall, and they’re flying down the ice in some vast and distant plain, a puck racing between them and obstacles whipping by.  In the morning Shitty says, “The giant lake. It was frozen.  Did you see–?” and Jack nods, and Holster says, “That bird, I thought that it was _coming_  for me.”

“We wouldn’t let it,” Shitty says, and Jack nods again.

He curls his hand around his spoon and keeps eating oatmeal.  He doesn’t know if anyone else saw the caves that he and Bittle found, after the bird–the way they slipped into the earth so easily, like sinking, a slide down ice to a place that felt like home.  Refracted sunlight leaking down onto drifts of snow and through stalagmites and icicles, but mostly dark, mostly silence, mostly cold, until Bittle found the enormous cavern at the heart of it, the vast expanse of ice, the still centre of the world.  He’d paused at the edge of it, afraid to venture in.

“Come on,” Jack had said, and taken his hand.  They’d skated into it.  Bittle had been hesitant to talk to him since overhearing Jack and Parse at the kegster, the kind of thing Jack really didn’t want to explain, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t welcome here.

They played tag and hide-and-seek and as they did sunlight reverberated down the vast columns of ice, lighting up the things Bitty tried to hide behind, chasing Jack into shadows.  Bitty was faster but Jack knew this place by heart. Some of the time when he’d been skating on a breakaway it hadn’t been to run away; it was because he wanted to show him somewhere new.

“It’s so beautiful,” Bittle had said breathlessly, when he and Jack had caught each other up by the hands, the caves whirling around them shining like ice and stars.

“I’m glad you found me,” Jack had said in return.

Bittle comes down the stairs, clunking his wheeled luggage on the steps after him.  He comes into the kitchen sleepy-eyed and with his coat on and takes a mini-pie from the counter.  “Catching the shuttle,” he explains.  His flight, like everyone else’s, is clearly lettered on the fridge; it leaves Boston in less than three hours.

“Last night,” Ransom says.  “Bits, you dreamed too, right…?”

Bittle looks at Jack, looks at the defensemen, his expression a little shuttered.  “Yeah.  Look, I slept in. I gotta go. Merry Christmas, you guys.”

Ransom and Holster hug him, and Shitty ruffles his hair.  Jack keeps holding his spoon and says, “Merry Christmas, Bittle.”

Then he looks down at his bowl.  This is his last winter with this team; the last time they’ll all dream together this way.

With Bittle gone and the door closed on the sunlight behind him, all it feels like is cold.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content Note:** Depictions of gore

This isn’t the first nightmare not his own Jack has had this spring. Inside the dream he can clearly remember all the times before, about running through a house and shrinking while he tried to reach too-tall cupboards and tabletops to collect everything he needed, his lungs compressing until he couldn’t breathe. About floating through a shipwreck trying to grab the people and things he sees floating past them. In all of them, that same tight, panicked desperation, and something about the quality of light and the shape of the world that says it isn’t his. Winter’s dreaming season is long over, and even the playoffs that might have extended it are over—but this still isn’t his dream.

He’s in a garden full of flowers, but an acrid slimy pollen is falling from the trees, and whatever it touches begins to turn brown and shriveled, like a chemical burn. The flowers are beautiful; he loves them, knows each and every one of them, its seasons, when it goes to seed, how to tend it. To combat the pollen he fills a watering can over and over and washes it away, trying to do it fast enough that nothing has started to wilt yet; whenever there’s a break in the pollen the flowers are still growing, still need tending and care, soil weeded, old blooms dead-headed. If he lingers too much in one area he turns around and finds disaster has struck another.

It lasts forever. The sky has gone from blue to black and green like an evil storm, like the sky before a tornado. He’s sick to his stomach with fear and desperation, with the knowledge that he’ll keep doing this if he wears his hands bloody and raw. The pollen infects the water tank he’s filling his can from; now every round includes another tedious step of drawing away the scum and finding an access to clean water inside.

The indignity of this, this extra added insult, breaks through Jack’s weary terror and his commitment to the task, and he realizes anew that this isn’t his dream; if he draws back in his mind there is still another dreamer shambling through the garden like a man possessed, sloshing water and blood onto the things that he loves. It’s a losing fight, a dying place, and Jack thinks: _I don’t like being at war with shadows. I’m going to stop playing their game anymore._

There is that consolation of having been the fuck-up who ODed on a bathroom floor and embarrassed himself in front of the entire world of hockey. He’s worked with his dreams, gone into their sick, dark places with a therapist dreaming beside him, learned that the shadows that hurt so much to carry need not, in the end, devour him. He’s told his parents hard truths and still received their blessings. He’s learned that there’s a far side of terror where things don’t need to scare you anymore.

And he makes himself wake up.

There’s a danger, when he does it, that he’ll fall back asleep, fall back into the dream. He rolls over once he can, landing on his knees beside his bed, his body disconnected and sleep-clumsy. It’s close to 2:30am, he reads his clock in the dark. After he kneels there a moment, almost forgetting his errand, he gets up and goes to the door. His hands kind of forget how to work, but then the knob gives; he stumbles across the hall.

Bitty’s door opens. Good. He’s dreaming fretfully on his bed. Jack sits beside him, then looks up and sees the door still open, gets up and shuts his across the hall and this one. When he gets back to the bed he’s somehow more composed, more certain of what he’s doing; he carefully picks his way over Bitty and flops down on his other side, lying next to him with Bitty under his arm. _I’m not going to leave you alone in this_ , he thinks, and presses his nose to the side of Bitty’s neck.

On the one hand: There is actually an infinite number of times you can watch someone suffer and stand back and say nothing. He knows this about humanity. It’s not that this is inevitable, like anyone would make this decision, that anyone would know what he knows and climb into this bed.

On the other: after you have seen somebody suffer enough, you can be reasonably sure that no matter how they feel about you, they would still rather you went in there after them. If Bittle resents the intrusion or feels strange unbalanced gratitude, Jack will be gone soon enough. Spring is slipping away fast.

The more he touches Bitty, the more eagerly sleep comes for him; when his circling hand comes up and rests against Bitty’s face he can almost feel the dream seep through his fingers.

The dream shifts; Bitty goes from lugging the can in another wearying round to sitting on the ground, Jack’s arms pressing him back into Jack’s chest. Bitty’s hands are flayed raw and smeared with dirt. Jack takes them in his own, squeezing and pressing the flesh together, trying to rub the life back into them. _I believe, I believe_ , he says to himself. _I believe that they are whole and clean again_.

“Jack,” Bitty says, and he begins to cry. “They’re ruined.”

Jack keeps working on Bitty’s hands, where the tips of his fingers have come back to being whole, but although they’re sitting they’re somehow closer to the flowers now so Jack can see the garden. Some of the flowers are whole, in their moment of perfect bloom, but streaked with dark pollen or damaged; others have grown too old, gone to seed, are chopped down or dormant, and their absence wounds him. Despite all his efforts, time would have carried this garden away from Bitty and left him in a season where he could only pray the seeds would sprout, the canes and vines wake up again.

The way it once was is not the way it ever will be again, and it’s breaking Bitty’s heart.

“Shh,” Jack says, rocking him, rubbing his hands closed. Bitty clutches him, sobbing. “You don’t get bad winters here,” Jack says, not good with words but trying to fill the silence. “Even then the grass will be green—you’ll get winter crops—it’ll still be a garden, and there will be flowers next year—”

“I can’t keep them safe,” Bitty wails. “Look at how much it’s hurting them.”

He gestures to a flower and Jack looks, ready to say something comforting, but the flower is him. The flower is him in his winter coat and scarf, with his camera, leaping over a snowbank, a bloom of a smile and hope and trust, lattes and hockey; it’s something Bitty tries to nurture and keep precious, protected. Something with frost biting at his roots, scars on him from years ago that Bitty can only glimpse; a patina of pollen, the little winces when Holster flips past the sports news, the way the Jack Bitty knows disappears when he talks to a reporter, the scouts and agents and NHL staff who want to carry him away into harsher weather. So little of it Bitty can fix.

They’re all like that, the entire garden; the almost-dead and drooping figure of a figure skater, someone planted long ago but not tended much since, bowed under Mrs. Bittle’s report of _not doing so well since her baby_ ; the fragile structure of Ransom, little understood but given the best support that Bitty can. And over and over and over the sunshine-bright defiance of Bitty, who keeps his chin up and tries to be cheerful and tries to have hope and tries not to let on about being worried or lonely or scared. He tries to tell himself that people will love him and he tries to tell himself he doesn’t need to be ashamed, and he tries not to shrivel up with bitterness and fear. But in this garden Jack can see how bravely the flowers are fighting and how much the effort hurts at night.

 _You’re not alone, you’re not alone,_ he tries to communicate. _Your bed isn’t empty; I am here with you._

“I just wanted a place where we could grow and be who were are,” Bitty chokes. “But I don’t think that it’s anywhere. Maybe we just weren’t supposed to.”

Jack holds him even tighter but he doesn’t know what to say, scarred and frost-bitten as he is; he wants Bitty to grow lush and brave in all the ways he himself can’t be, tanned for the summer with freckles across his nose, joyful because his shorts are small and tight and he just smirks about all the boys looking. He never wants Bitty to have to survive a season of frost. But they met on the ice, and he doesn’t know how to protect Bitty from that. They’re going to get stained and smeared and withered, battered and cross-checked and wearied by life. There are already times Bitty feels unloved and ashamed.

He rubs Bitty’s hands again, then lets go to check his palms; they’re whole again, though soft and still a little raw. If he tries picking up the watering can again he’ll reopen his wounds.

“Wake up,” Jack says softly to him, and suddenly his heart is pounding in his chest. He’s afraid to wake up, but Jack can’t leave him alone in this. “Do you feel this?“ It’s his arms around Bitty, one minute in the dream, one minute clutching at him, at the coverlet, sleep-thick and uncoordinated. "You’re safe. Come on. I’ve got you. I’m at your back. You’re not alone.”

He tries to pull Bitty with him, through the veil of sleep, but when he wakes up Bitty hasn’t awoken with him. So Jack props himself up on one elbow and puts his hand flat on Bitty’s back and begins rubbing it slowly, up and down, the way his mother used to sometimes wake him up when he was a child. Finally he can hear Bitty suck in breath, sleep’s rhythm disrupted, and make a thick incoherent noise. “Bitty,” Jack says, “wake up.”

Bitty draws in a deep breath again, scrunches his eyes closed, buries his face into the pillow. Jack gets up, crawling over him and walking across the floor, and fetches Bitty’s water bottle. He brings it back, climbs back onto the bed, and shakes Bitty’s shoulder again.

“Sit up and drink some water,” he says. “You had a bad dream. If you fall back asleep now you might go back into it.”

Bitty complies groggily, dragging himself up against the headboard and taking the bottle Jack has opened for him. He drinks, then puts it back into Jack’s waiting hand. “You—came into the dream after me,” he says warily. “I—guess I might have been causing some trouble for you. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

He means the way they’ve dreamt into each other since December. When he got back from Christmas break he’d tried to apologize, in a roundabout way, for the dream with the ice caves; offered to move back into dorms, further away. “The room is yours until graduation,” Jack had said. “It’s in the bylaws.”

“I thought somebody should,” he says now, leaning against Bitty’s headboard. “You shouldn’t have to carry that alone." Bitty’s face tightens and he looks away, and Jack says, "You shouldn’t have to carry the entire team alone, either. You don’t need to look after us all yourself.”

“You say that, but then you act like it’s your job,” Bitty replies. “Carrying me carrying you. Coming in and saving me.”

Jack’s quiet for a minute, and he pours some of Bitty’s water bottle into his mouth and screws the lid shut. Then he says, “August of 2009, I was in rehab after my overdose. I was pretty depressed. I felt like I screwed up my life, like nothing else mattered. And then I… I woke up from a dream, one day. One morning. I could taste your peach pie filling. It was still hot. It was like… the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted. The first time I even wanted to eat anything for longer than I could remember. I ate breakfast that day. It was like it… reminded me that I wanted to live.”

Bitty turns and looks at him and Jack finds himself looking down, finds his eyes fixed on Bitty’s hands. He takes one of them in his.

“It feels like before I even met you,” he confesses, “you were showing me how to get better. You saved me first. You always make me question… everything. And I’m an asshole. I don’t like being questioned. I don’t like change. I don’t like… feeling like everything that’s important to me is just a cute distraction, and I don’t even understand the fundamentals of life, like who Beyoncé is.”

“Jack,” Bitty says, “I would never want to make you feel like—”

“It took me a long time to adjust to,” Jack interrupts. “To get used to you being so different. To learn I had anything in common with you. To think that maybe… the things in me that were different from you were maybe the reasons you… liked me.”

Bitty looks at him with fond exasperation in the dim light, exactly the expression that used to make Jack feel mortified and now makes his chest feel… tight. “Of course they were,” he says softly.

Jack shrugs, looking down at the hand he’s clinging to. “I thought some pretty uncharitable things about you at first. Maybe you didn’t for me." He shrugs. "I’m an asshole. I didn't…”

Bitty covers Jack’s hand with his free one. “You’re a pretty good friend now,” he says.

“I think we’re dreaming together because,” Jack says, and stops. He traces his thumb along the side of Bitty’s hand. He’s tried soulmates and destiny before; they don’t persuade him as arguments. “I think I’m in love with you,” he says, and looks up into Bitty’s face. “I think you’re the most wonderful person I’ve ever met. I came after you because I didn’t want you to be alone. I—” he looks down again at their hands. “I wanted you to be with me.”

There are silver tears brimming in Bitty’s eyes, splashing down his cheeks. He sniffs, then heaves himself upright to throw his arms around Jack, who catches him and holds him in return. He leans Bitty against his shoulder, rocking him slightly.

“It’s okay if you don’t feel the same way,” Jack whispers, “I just—wanted to say.”

“Thank you,” Bitty says, muffled against Jack’s chest, and then he pulls free and looks up. “It's—really true?”

Jack leans forward and plants a kiss softly on his lips. Bitty receives it like a benediction, waiting with his eyes closed to learn the truth and be set free. “I want to prove it to you a thousand ways,” Jack says.

“I,” Bitty says shakily, lets out an unsteady breath. He leans up suddenly, planting a kiss on Jack, emphatic and firm. “Yes,” he says decisively, and then his voice is suddenly cut sharp by tears. “You’re sure I’m not still dreamin’? I’ve been waiting for you to say that for a long time.”

Jack pinches his arm, which makes him jump and hiss, rubbing it while glaring at him.

“You knew I was an asshole,” Jack says unrepentantly.

“I did." Bitty sounds surly, but he reaches up to kiss Jack again. After their first brush of lips Jack settles his mouth against Bitty, sweetly acquainting their lips, learning the ways they fit together.

"A thousand ways, huh?” Bitty says, smiling against his mouth.

Jack smiles back, a dam of worry dissolving in his chest. He had so many little half-formed plans, shored up against the possibility that Bitty wouldn’t want him, wouldn’t welcome this. It flattens and re-forms his mental architecture to realize he’s welcome to try them. “I think I have that many." He brushes hair out of Bitty’s eyes. "It might take a while to do them all.”

“Well—” Bitty says, with a little kiss, then breaks, “Mr. Zimmerman, feel free—” he kisses Jack again, “—to start any time.”

So Jack does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Other people playing in this universe:
> 
> [Meta](http://stultiloquentia.tumblr.com/post/143553369825/as-another-person-who-doesnt-usually-like) by Stultiloquentia
> 
> [Fic (Jack/Bitty, dreaming about Jack/Bitty/Parse) with great worldbuilding](http://cadenzamuse.tumblr.com/post/143543094881/as-another-person-who-doesnt-usually-like) by Cadenzamuse

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [I regret to inform you (I think we're in love)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7794031) by [garden of succulents (staranise)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/staranise/pseuds/garden%20of%20succulents)




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